Dr Peter Silberberg, a GP at Jullums Aboriginal Medical Service in Lismore and Chair of NCPHN’s Northern Clinical Council, has signed up to trial the Orion Shared Care tool to enhance communication between teams of health care professionals. And he recommends other GPs take a look at it.
The Orion Shared Care Tool is a collaboration between the Northern NSW Local Health District, North Coast Primary Health Network (NCPHN) and NSW Health’s eHealth. It is a shared care planning tool for patients with complex and chronic needs. It allows the GP and other team members to create and update a living care plan.
It lets care team members add other information about the patient and makes it easier to securely share information between care team members. The tool integrates with Medical Director and Best Practice for GPs. Other clinicians access it via a web portal.
The free to use system is external to My Health Record and Peter said he’s using it for patients he sees who are linked to Community Mental Health.
“Orion allows me to see their three-month psychiatric reviews and I can also have direct communication with their case workers. Orion allows me to share basic information such as past history, medications and allergies and I can easily download letters or health summaries.
“So far I’m impressed by this new electronic system even though I’m a slow up-taker of new systems. I’m still not on Facebook!”
Peter was trained by Northern NSW Local Health District’s Orion team and he said they are easily contacted to obtain support. He is also giving the team useful feedback to make the system more user friendly and clinically useful.
He said that while there was about five minutes involved to set up the care team for a patient, once that’s done it’s fairly quick to keep track of new messages as he receives an email notification when a new message is added.
Peter is pleased to have the opportunity to be part of a new e-health system that allows better communication with colleagues working for the Local Health District.
